論文
ジメチルエーテル推進剤を用いた平行平板型パルスプラズマ推進機
2013 年 61 巻 2 号 p. 47-50
詳細
2013 年 61 巻 2 号 p. 47-50
Use of liquid propellants, such as water or ethanol, as an alternative to the most common propellant, solid Teflon, for a pulsed plasma thruster (PPT) is reported to improve the performance of PPT by excluding the drawbacks of uncontrollable propellant feed rate and timing, while maintaining the advantages of digital control features. In this study, we propose to use dimethyl ether (DME) as for the liquid propellant PPT, because DME has a low freezing point (131K at standard pressure) and an expedient vapor pressure (6 atm at standard temperature), both of which eliminate the need for a heater and pressurant when using a water or ethanol propellant. A series of experiments using a prototype DME-PPT with parallel-plate electrodes demonstrated reliable operation with a tendency for the electromagnetic impulse bit Ibit to increase in proportion to the stored capacitor energy Ec up to Ibit = 53μNs at Ec = 13J.
